"This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September 2010. It is the third of the four reports planned for 2010. During this period, we were victims of one of the biggest BSD events of the year - EuroBSDCon. We hope that the ones of you who have been able to attend it have enjoyed your stay. Another good news is that work on the new minor versions of FreeBSD, 7.4 and 8.2, is progressing well."

I've been a FreeBSD fan since 4.6 was the latest, and have loved the cohesiveness of the whole project. In my mind, Debian is the only Linux distribution that comes close in that regard.

My favorite part from the report:

Work is progressing quickly on a major re-factoring of PC-BSD tools and the PBI format for 9.0. Our GUI tools have been converted to compile / run within native QT without KDE now, allowing us to begin offering support for other desktop environments for 9.0, such as Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, KDE, etc. The PBI format has undergone a complete evolution, and is now entirely command-line based for all aspects of it, with only a few dependencies upon curl & xdg-utils. This will allow us to begin offering PBIs for traditional FreeBSD users starting with 9.0, who will be able to install the pbi-manager from ports in the near future.

It's been a while since I tried out PC-BSD, but I remember my brief stint with it fondly. FreeBSD does need a more capable package management solution. Hopefully this suffices.

<nostalgia>I remember buying the 2.1.5 CD set. Coming from Linux, I really liked it, and started experimenting every now and then. Without an internet connection, I couldn't really use ports. So, I usually copied over source tarballs from the Linux Developer Resource Kit or Slackware CDs (which used to include Sunsite and TSX-11 snapshots), and modified the portfiles to compile with those tarballs. With the 2.2.8 set I got really hooked, and became a regular BSD user, until a few years ago (unless OS X counts).</nostalgia>

Looking at the quarterly reports, I am always amazed how much they get done outside the limelight. It must be hard to get contributors with virtually no media exposure.

Just thinking back myself when I first got hooked on this wonderful operating system when it was known as 386BSD-0.1. I had to use a mail to FTP gateway to individually download a ton of floppy images and then write each one to a 3.5" floppy and then install the system from floppy. It took forever but it was worth it. I wonder what happened to some of the characters around in those days - Jordan K Hubbard and Jesus Monroe Jnr.

The PBI system is interesting - if I recall this correctly, each PBI is meant to be a complete self-contained install of a program, containing all the dependencies. It wastes some space, but makes the system very simple to work with.

The PBI system is interesting - if I recall this correctly, each PBI is meant to be a complete self-contained install of a program, containing all the dependencies. It wastes some space, but makes the system very simple to work with.

Interesting.

With how cheap disk space is these days, I can see the logic in what they're doing.

Speculating for a moment: I wouldn't be suprised if some of the additional disk space could be recovered via ZFS deduping.

It is a trade-off. Disk space is not so much of an issue. But if some commonly-used library contains a security vulnerability, lots of PBIs need upgrading. I am not sure if the average desktop user cares. And it's certainly not a step back from OS X application bundles, or Windows' "lets include all DLLs with the application to be sure"*.

Chakra (an Arch linux spin-off) is trying the same thing with "bundles". The few of their bundles I've seen are smaller than PBIs (Firefox for example is half smaller -but still twice as big as the windows exe). http://chakra-project.org/bundles.html

It would be good to have a technical comparison, but I'm too inexperienced for that.